John Cornyn: “our Democratic colleagues in the House and, to some extent, here in the Senate have talked about how the so- called…”

“our Democratic colleagues in the House and, to some extent, here in the Senate have talked about how the so- called Build Back Better legislation is popular, but I think the main reason it is popular is because, frankly, many Members of Congress and certainly the public at large don't know what is in it. So I would like to spend just a few minutes talking about that. First of all, there is the size of the bill. Originally, the Budget Committee chairman, the Senator from Vermont, floated a $6 trillion spending bonanza. This, of course, was on top of about $5 trillion we spent last year in a bipartisan fashion dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. But, of course, this $6 trillion more was designed to be passed with a pure party-line vote through the reconciliation process. After some pushback, the $6 trillion figure that Chairman Sanders proposed was cut back to 3.5, and now our colleagues in the House and elsewhere are touting a new pared-down bill which spends only--and I underline the word ``only''--$1.75 trillion. I dare say that is a number that none of us can fully comprehend given its magnitude, but it has become--sort of rolls off our tongues like everybody understands what a trillion dollars is like everybody knows what a million is or a thousand or a hundred or ten dollars. But it is an enormous number.…”